


Silent In Her Own History

by theinsideoutmermaid



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Post-Prince Caspian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-18 22:28:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29616378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theinsideoutmermaid/pseuds/theinsideoutmermaid
Summary: Susan learns about the Scythians, and unfortunately, about herself.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17





	Silent In Her Own History

Susan puts on her nylons carefully. The seam on one of the toes looks suspiciously weak, and she can’t afford to ruin this pair. Her floor monitor job barely covers the cost of textbooks. After the nylons comes the skirt—nipped waist, flared hem. Tuck in the blouse. Lipstick: red and precise. Susan backs up, squinting at the image of herself in the small oval mirror she has hung on her dormitory wall.

Susan doesn’t look like a student. She doesn’t want to. She wants to look like the women on the cover of _Vogue_ : the modern woman, the New Look. Why? Who knows why. (She does know, though she has not articulated it to herself: because the women in the magazines are seen. Susan, the invisible, long-suffering, _gentle_ eldest daughter wants to be seen.)

It is nine in the morning. She has lecture in half an hour: Classics. She didn’t do the assigned readings. In secondary school, she had taken Latin and Ancient Greek and just scraped a passing grade. Edmund is the one with the knack for languages—and Lucy, too, to an extent, although she does better with modern ones. It’s because she wants to be able to talk to people, Lucy had once explained to Susan. As far as Susan is concerned, people can talk to _her._

Most people did not expect Susan to pursue a degree. Of those who did, most expected her to major in nursing or education. And since Susan hates children and hates touching sick people and hates to do what’s expected of her, she applied as an English major. She regrets that now. Firstly because she has to take Classics, and secondly because it leaves her at a dead end of opportunities. Susan wants to do something that would make her a lot of money. Were she a boy, she could study economics or political science or law. After a few years of paying her dues, she would be wealthy and wear tailored clothes and drink fine wine. Instead, she rips apart her mother’s old skirts and remakes them in God’s own image; that is to say, Christian Dior’s. She drinks whatever cheap wine her roommate can sneak past the head of house. And she wears nylons with the lines up the back so that some boy from the Faculty of Law will take notice, and put a ring on her finger, and she’ll rip a pair of nylons every day and he’ll just buy another.

Susan expressed this plan of hers to Peter once. Just once. He had looked so disgusted that she thought about crying, but instead she chilled her expression into one of proud apathy. Silver cynical Susan. It’s all well and good for Peter, golden boy, who will get his law degree and run for Parliament and become some benevolent ruler, adored by the poor and the meek. He can afford to be principled.

Susan and Peter don’t talk much anymore.

***

Professor Maxwell is talking about Herodotus. Herodotus’ Histories. Apparently, in the fifth century BCE, a man could write whatever he wanted about the people and places around him and call it history. Then Susan thinks it probably still works the same way. Susan is opinionated on the subject of history, especially wars. She sometimes forgets herself and says these opinions out loud. People’s reactions fall somewhere on the scale of laughter to fury. “What do you really know of war,” they say, “you were a child, hidden in the countryside; you’re a woman, you can’t be drafted. What gives you the right?” And she cannot explain, and she will not explain, even to herself.

“Herodotus wrote of a people the Greeks called Scythians,” explains Maxwell. “They were mobile horsemen who wore strange hats and bedecked themselves in gold scales. They had no written language, so what is known of them today comes mainly from people like Herodotus and archaeological excavations.”

Susan considers this: to be silent in your own history. She thinks—well, she thinks she will not be recorded in history at all, but if she were to be, she’d like to write it herself. What core truths can any observer find in her behavior? Who can see a soul in empty lipstick tubes and rotting nylons? _No one knows me,_ thinks Susan. _No one knows me, not even Lucy, Lucy thinks I’m cruel, and Edmund thinks I’m vapid, and Peter thinks I’m mercenary, and I am, I am, but I am more, am I not? Was I ever?_

“The Scythians were archers,” says Maxwell. “They used composite bows. The Greeks were frightened of them.” 

Yes, Susan thinks, they would make a formidable force. The superior agility of cavalry as opposed to infantry, and of course a mounted archer with a composite bow is quite deadly. She can see the battle in her head, the ebb and flow of the lines, the way the nomads can retreat and retreat without it meaning defeat. She can hear it: the whistles, the hoofbeats, the screams.

“And the Greeks thought them wild and strange,” continues Professor Maxwell, “for Scythian women fought with the men.” He switches to a new slide on the projector. It shows that Greek red and black pottery. “This depicts the Greek legend of the Amazons—women warriors. Look at her.” There is a slender figure, twisted, drawing an arrow for her composite bow. She wears a tight shirt and leggings—practical clothing. “Certain scholars believe Sycthian women inspired the legend of the Amazons.”

Susan is aware of her hands, clasped together in her lap. Her fingers are smooth and slender. _I have no calluses,_ she thinks. And then, _I have no calluses_ anymore.

Professor Maxwell switches slides again. Now a deerlike creature crouches on the screen, its legs tucked underneath it, its antlers huge, curling, recursive. Is it running or dying? Is it a god?

“Scythian animal style,” says the Professor. “The Scythians were particularly interested in cervids. One can see the motif of the stag—if it even is a stag—over and over in Scythian art.”

A white stag. Susan knows there was a white stag. A white stag, and then a lamppost.

“Scenes of predation were also popular. Here is a lion, in a similar style to the stag.”

There it is: his face, awful, beautiful.

She stands and walks out of the lecture hall.

***

Last summer, when Peter was about to start his second year of university and Susan her first, and Lucy was out with friends and Edmund in his room studying, Susan found herself in the kitchen with Peter. 

Peter said, “Do you really not remember it?”

“Remember what?” said Susan.

The corners of Peter’s mouth tensed. “Please don’t be difficult, Su. You know.”

Susan watched a bee outside the window. It was too hot in their house. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific.” She felt as thrilled and dizzy as if she were perched on the rail of a high bridge. Would he say it? Could she bear it?

“Narnia.”

She had not allowed herself to say the word, not even to think of it, for years. Once, she could tolerate the pain it brought. Now it burned, and she thought she could die of it.

A small laugh escaped her lips instead. “Oh, that. You mean the game we played as children?”

“But it wasn’t—” Peter stopped. He looked at her warily, and she held his gaze. Neither of them said anything for a while after. Susan watched him think. She could see each emotion as it arose and settled and was replaced by the next. Honest Peter, with his open face. She loved him for it.

Eventually, Peter nodded and left her.

When he was at the kitchen door, Susan said—she hadn’t meant to—“What good does it do, anyway—to remember? We aren’t children anymore. Maybe it was fun then, but we were young, and—and stupid. It wasn’t real. It doesn’t help us.” She said, “I hated being a child. I hated it. I always knew I’d be better off as an adult, and now I am. At least let me enjoy it.”

Peter turned to look back at Susan. His face was terrible, and she did not know why until she realized she could not read what it was saying. She stood with her throat hot and tight. 

“Do you enjoy it, Susan?” said Peter. And he walked away.

Later, Susan thought she would name his expression as pity.

***

Susan is in the library. It is midnight, or past midnight. She doesn’t know. She wears a watch, but it was already broken when she bought it from the charity shop. She only looks at it when she needs to escape a conversation. “Oh, is it that time already?”

A lone desk lamp flares orange into the papery darkness. Susan has stacked books on every available surface around her. Translations of Herodotus, Greek histories, dissertations on nomadic warfare, great tomes on the Silk Roads, archaeological reports on Inner Eurasian tombs.

She looks at one of the archaeological reports now. It is narrow, cheaply bound, and clearly hand-typed on some doctoral student’s home typewriter. Susan doesn’t understand everything she sees in the report, but it is only the methods of excavation and analysis that give her trouble, and she does not need to know those, anyway. Likewise, she skims through the pages listing every shard of pottery and scrap of metal the archaeologist found, and when and where. But now the archaeologist has entered the tomb itself—the kurgan, he calls it—and Susan finds herself drawn with him into the burial mound.

Within lies a human skeleton, accompanied by parts of a horse skeleton and precious bits of artwork and jewelry. What Susan has learned tonight is that a kurgan should be rich. The Scythians adorned their dead as they did the living, with hundreds of pieces of gold. Susan thinks about how dull the dead are today.

She flips the page to find a sketch of the human skeleton. The artist has carefully marked out the angles at which the bones lay and the places where they found rings or belt buckles or bracelets. Even most of the clothing was preserved, by some miracle of climate. Dressed as a warrior, writes the archaeologist. The skeleton has an ornate scabbard at its thigh, a lion carved into the gold plating, and a fine gold thimble-like object by its fingers. Some tool for archery, suggests the archaeologist. Susan frowns at the sketch of the thimble, trying to imagine it on her own finger. Is that a small lip on which to catch the bowstring? Would she have to adjust her form in order to use it?

And then she sees it: in a paragraph discussing the dimensions of the skeleton, the archaeologist notes, “Smaller than average. Wide-hipped. Female?”

A woman warrior, buried like a king.

_Where is my bow?_ thinks Susan. _Where is my quiver, my horn? I need them. They belong to me. They created me. Where will they be when I am buried? I was a warrior, I was a queen. I was a lioness._

_When I die, who will know who I am? Who knows who I am?_

***

In her dormitory, Susan slowly, coldly, deliberately rips open the toe seam of her nylons.

**Author's Note:**

> The chronology of archaeological discoveries might not be exactly correct--I took some liberties for the fic.


End file.
